This paper proposes COPE, a new architecture for wireless mesh networks. In addition to forwarding packets, routers mix (i.e., code) packets from different sources to increase the information content of each transmission. We show that intelligently mixing packets increases network throughput. Our design is rooted in the theory of network coding. Prior work on network coding is mainly theoretical and focuses on multicast traffic. This paper aims to bridge theory with practice; it addresses the common case of unicast traffic, dynamic and potentially bursty flows, and practical issues facing the integration of network coding in the current network stack. We evaluate our design on a 20-node wireless network, and discuss the results of the first testbed deployment of wireless network coding. The results show that COPE largely increases network throughput. The gains vary from a few percent to several folds depending on the traffic pattern, congestion level, and transport protocol.

Recently, network coding emerged as a promising technology that can provide significant improvements in throughput and energy efficiency of wireless networks, even for unicast communication. Often, network coding schemes are designed as an autonomous layer, independent of the underlying Phy and MAC capabilities and algorithms. Consequently, these schemes are greedy, in the sense that all opportunities of broadcasting combinations of packets are exploited. We demonstrate that this greedy design principle may in fact reduce the network throughput. This begets the need for adaptive network coding schemes. We further show that designing appropriate MAC scheduling algorithms is critical for achieving the throughput gains expected from network coding. In this paper, we propose a general framework to develop optimal and adaptive joint network coding and scheduling schemes. Optimality is shown for various Phy and MAC constraints. We apply this framework to two different network coding architectures: COPE, a scheme recently proposed in [7], and XOR-Sym, a new scheme we present here. XOR-Sym is designed to achieve a lower implementation complexity than that of COPE, and yet to provide similar throughput gains.

Network coding is a new transmission paradigm that proved its strength in optimizing the usage of network resources. In this paper, we evaluate the gain from using network coding for file sharing applications running on top of wireless mesh networks. With extensive simulations carried out on a simulator we developed specifically for this study, we confirm that network coding can improve the performance of the file sharing application, but not as in wired networks. The main reason is that nodes over wireless cannot listen to different neighbors simultaneously. Nevertheless, one can get more from network coding if the information transmission is made more diverse inside the network. We support this argument by varying the loss rate over wireless links and adding more sources. 1

Abstract—Network coding has been proposed as a technique that can potentially increase the transport capacity of a wireless network via processing and mixing of data packets at intermediate routers. However, most previous studies either assume a fixed transmission rate or do not consider the impact of using diverse rates on the network coding gain. Since in many cases, network coding implicitly relies on overhearing, the choice of the transmission rate has a big impact on the achievable gains. The use of higher rates works in favor of increasing the native throughput; however, it may in many cases work against effective overhearing. In other words, there is a tension between the achievable network coding gain and the inherent rate gain possible on a link. In this paper 1, our goal is to drive the network towards achieving the best trade-off between these two contradictory effects. Towards this, we design a distributed framework that (a) facilitates the choice of the best rate on each link while considering the need for overhearing and (b) dictates the choice of which decoding recipient will acknowledge the reception of an encoded packet. We demonstrate that both of these features contribute significantly towards gains in throughput. We extensively simulate our framework in a variety of topological settings. We also fully implement it on real hardware and demonstrate its applicability and performance gains via proofof-concept experiments on our wireless testbed. We show that our framework yields throughput gains of up to 390 % as compared to what is achieved in a rate-unaware network coding framework. I.